Meta Review: Top Affiliate Programs for Bloggers for 2023?

Affiliate marketing is a popular and effective way for bloggers to monetize their websites and earn passive income.

When you promote products or services on your website, you can earn a commission for each sale or click. Basically, you turn your blog traffic into a source of revenue.

But which products or services should you promote? To help answer this question, we used RankIQ —an AI-enabled SEO content tool— and the ever-popular ChatGPT 3.5 to identify ten articles that recommended affiliate programs for bloggers.

As it turned out, these articles also tended to rank well on the Google search engine results page for the query, "affiliate programs for bloggers." Here are the articles we reviewed.

Identifying Affiliate Programs

We next asked ChatGPT to list all of the recommended affiliate programs, and focused on the affiliate programs mentioned the most often across all of the articles being reviewed. Remember, we were considering ten articles, so ten mentions would have been a perfect score.

These are the affiliate programs mentioned the most frequently. The count column, obviously, lists the number of articles that mentioned the affiliate program in view on March 28, 2023, when the articles were reviewed.

As the sage-like ChatGPT pointed out, "it's worth noting that many of these programs are popular and well-established, so it's not surprising to see them recommended by multiple sources."

Other than noticing that these are established affiliate programs, we can see that there were other common threads, if you will, around website building, services, and ecommerce. These affiliate programs may have been chosen because they are relatively generic. Almost any blogger can find a product on Amazon to recommend or pitch a hosting service.

While the articles reviewed discussed commission structure and earnings. These did not seem to be a strong driver for the affiliate programs actually recommended.

Does this Help You Find an Affiliate Program?

To be honest, we felt a little unsatisfied. We'd hoped that looking at high-ranking articles with lists of affiliate programs we would find some real gems. But in the end we felt like these were sort of the vanilla selections. Not that vanilla is bad. Just that there were not too many surprises.

Not all was lost. Based on the articles we reviewed, here are some conclusions that you might draw as a blogger when selecting an affiliate program:

• Consider the niche and topic of your blog when selecting affiliate programs. Some programs may be better suited for certain niches than others, so it's important to choose programs that align with your blog's focus. If you are passionate about a product, it is probably a good fit. So check for an affiliate program.
• Look for affiliate programs with high commission rates, but also consider other factors like the quality of the products or services being promoted, the user-friendliness of the platform, and the program's reputation.
• Consider affiliate programs that align with your blog's values and mission. For example, if your blog promotes sustainable or ethical living, you may want to look for affiliate programs that offer eco-friendly or fair-trade products.
• Be selective when choosing affiliate programs, and don't promote products or services that you wouldn't personally use or recommend. Your readers trust your opinions, so it's important to only promote products that you truly believe in.
• Don't be afraid to experiment with different affiliate programs to find the ones that work best for your blog and audience. Keep track of your earnings and adjust your strategies as needed to maximize your income.